With the holiday season comes the traditional holiday movie reruns, like The Wizard of Oz. This movie is an old favorite of mine. As a child, the family would gather around our 12” black and white television and watch it every year. 🙂

Each of the main sojourners in this movie have their separate quests. The Straw Man seeks wisdom, the Tin Man wants a heart, the Lion wants Courage and Dorothy wants to go home. At the end of the movie, The Wizard of Oz bequeaths each of them, except Dorothy, with those desired things.

Even as a young girl, my favorite character has always been the Tin Man. His earnest longing for feelings, that he described as having a heart, seemed so touching to me. I found it interesting that, as the Wizard was giving a heart to the Tin Man, he spoke these words:

Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable

Maybe that’s so …

Tradition soldiers on for me, as I watch The Wizard of Oz over and over again each year. Even though Mom isn’t around to make fresh popcorn and my ideas about what is “home” have changed, the movie has its charm and contains some good messages that we should take to heart. Dorothy’s revelation that she needs to look no further than her own back yard for her heart’s desire is, perhaps, another way of saying that happiness can only be found within ourselves.

Comments

It took many years to figure out what Dorothy did get out of it. I think now that all she had to do to get out of “crazy land” was to Decide to.

Once I decided to get out of my crazy N-invested land, the real journey began.

It wasn’t easy finding my home because I had none. I was forced to leave my N-mother at only 14. Thank goddess for group homes, it was the structure and support I needed to make it.

Years later I found myself married to an N because I had no clue, was still finding my way, etc. I’m sure you know the drill.

But once I clicked my shoes and DECIDED that this is it – no more – ever – I started going to Al-Anon just for support. I learned alot there. Maybe we’ll have a N-anon group some day…

But here is what I want to share. This is NOT easy, but this is how I finally crossed the river and have had NO N people in my life ever since.

I wrote down every N or N-type I ever knew on paper and made a couple columns. Next to their name I wrote what attracted me to them in the first place, what I really liked about them, what ‘promise’ I assumed I would get from them and what short-comings I had that I knew they wouldn’t care about. (In other words, I knew with their short-comings, they would over look mine, at the time I was a pot smoker), so “good-clean-healthy folks might not like me”, was my thinking at the time.

Then I wrote what I assumed or thought at the time that they liked about me. Why were they so attracted to me? How did they stroke my ego…What did they like that I had?

I cried and raged and shamed myself through this list – but I knew I had to do the work or be forever a victim.

Then the last column was “What must I believe about myself to make this what I wanted”. You see, I didn’t believe I was good enough for the nice healthy people. I thought they would reject me. I found out some hard truths about myself, but if I didn’t find them out, there was no way on working on them to change myself.

The 3 main things I saw as a common theme – when I stopped looking at them and started looking at me – was this:

Then I worked on myself and made a LIST of what I’d never put up with again, all the Red Flags, and every date I went on I’d evaluate them and weeded out the bad ones. It wasn’t long before I was comfortable dating nice (and also imperfect) guys and what used to be “attractive or even addictive” to me faded away. N people used to pull me in somehow according to my weaknesses above, but after I got wise to that and worked on myself I am now repelled by them and they don’t like me too much either. Why? Because I’m no longer a source of N-supply for them, and somehow they pick this up I think. They know how to pick up on ‘weakness’ signals, and my weaknesses (above) are things I worked on in my own recovery. They were un-truths, but I clicked my heals and decided not to believe in them anymore. I replaced them and made nice friends along the way.

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